Editorial

Welcome to Volume 8, Issue 2 of the Journal of Search and Rescue. This issue brings together work on the risks created by uncoordinated public drone use, new guidance for flight-testing SAR innovations, a proposed triage model for aquatic mass-casualty incidents, and a large-scale review of JESIP performance in UK incident command assessments, all offering advances in understanding of the challenges and emerging practice in SAR.

I want to use this editorial to mark the sad passing of our editorial board colleague and friend Toby Meredith. Many of you will have known Toby through his work on this journal, as an academic at the University of Portsmouth, his involvement in drone technology for disaster response and crisis mapping.

Toby started flying drones at Portsmouth about ten years ago and helped build the capability there from almost nothing. He worked in Dominica after Hurricane Maria, and later spent time in Senegal looking at seagrass with the Wingtra. Most of his projects sat somewhere between people, technology and hazards, using drones and data to make sense of risk and to help others plan for it. He also worked with the World Food Programme, travelling to Mozambique and later hosting WFP colleagues in Portsmouth. I was fortunate to spend two weeks in Africa with Toby on that project.

Some of you reading this will have been part of those trips or will remember planning them with him. The projects were serious scientific or response endeavours, but if you travelled or worked with Toby you will probably remember the laughter and the joy as much as the day job.

That is my strongest memory of Toby; obviously he was clever, capable and committed, but when I think back to Toby I hear the jokes. One of my favourite memories is in an evening in Maputo in Mozamonique, following two weeks of tough research, at a restaurant overlooking the Indian Ocean. The pressure was off, having completed the project data collection and we sat, shared a couple of bottles of wine some incredible seafood and chatted about our lives, our interests, our families, our ambitions and I remember feeling at that point how lucky I was to have him as a colleague and a friend.

Inside the journal he was a key component, taking on important tasks behind the scenes, writing editorials and contributing articles to the journal. When he reviewed work, he did it with the aim of the publishing work, not providing barriers to publication. This is the central ethos of the Journal, and absolutely critical given our authors are often practitioners firstmost, and not from traditional academic backgrounds – but Toby embodied that ethos.

Some of Toby’s work appears in this issue and some will follow in the next one. These papers were already moving through our normal process before he died. We decided not to attempt to turn them into tributes, but to leave them to stand as they are: pieces of work that tackle real issues in our field, and contribute to making the communities we serve safer. Future readers will just see good, useful, practical research.

To all of you who knew and loved Toby, I know that an editorial cannot possibly carry the full weight of your loss, but I hope it helps in a small way to see how widely he was respected and how many people learned from him and enjoyed working with him.

I want to end with a simple thought. Toby’s death is a hard reminder that our community is made up of real people with lives, families and limits. The work you all do in search and rescue, crisis response and disaster risk reduction is so, so valuable, but also demanding and often exhausting. So please, look after each other. Check in on your colleagues. Hug your loved ones. Embrace life, and laugh as much as you can. When you are doing what you do in these incredible places around the world, stop and think, soak in the environment and remember what a privilege it is to work in this field.

And as you continue your research, training and operations, stay safe. The work you are doing is important, and so are you.

Ian Greatbatch